000			03011cam a2200325 i 4500
001			ocm1013720994
005			20190927095831.0
008			180111t20182018nyu b 001 0 eng
010			_a 2018000804
020			_a0231185715 _qpaperback
020			_a9780231185714 _qpaperback
020			_a9780231185707
020			_a0231185707
035			_a(OCoLC)on1013720994
040			_aDLC _beng _erda _cDLC _dBDX _dYDX _dOCLCO _dOCLCQ _dERASA _dOCLCF _dTOH _dNYP _dYDX _dMiTN
042			_apcc
050	0	0	_aBL535 _b.J35 2018
100	1		_aJanes, Regina M.,
245	1	0	_aInventing afterlives : _bthe stories we tell ourselves about life after death / _cRegina M. Janes.
264		1	_aNew York : _bColumbia University Press, _c[2018]
264		4	_c℗♭2018.
300			_axvii, 371 pages ; _c23 cm.
336			_atext _btxt _2rdacontent.
337			_aunmediated _bn _2rdamedia.
338			_avolume _bnc _2rdacarrier.
504			_aIncludes bibliographical references and index.
505	0	0	_tConcerning the Present State of Life After Death -- _tImpermanent Eternities: Egypt, Sumer, and Babylon, Ancient Israel, Greece, and Rome -- _tTouring Asian Afterlives: Eternal Impermanence -- _tPursuing Happiness: How the Enlightenment Invented an Afterlife to Wish for -- _tWanda⁺єfuru Raifu or Afterlife Inventions and Variations.
520	8		_aWhy is belief in an afterlife so persistent across times and cultures? And how can it coexist with disbelief in an afterlife? Most modern thinkers hold that afterlife belief serves such important psychological and social purposes as consoling survivors, enforcing morality, dispensing justice, or giving life meaning. Yet the earliest, and some more recent, afterlives strikingly fail to satisfy those needs. Regina M. Janes proposes a new theory of the origins of the hereafter rooted in the question that a dead body raises: where has the life gone? Humans then and now, in communities and as individuals, ponder what they would want or experience were they in that body. From this endlessly recurring situation, afterlife narratives develop in all their complexity, variety, and ingenuity. Exploring afterlives from Egypt to Sumer, among Jews, Greeks, and Romans, to Christianity's advent and Islam's rise, Janes reveals how little concern ancient afterlives had with morality. In south and east Asia, karmic rebirth makes morality self-enforcing and raises a new problem: how to stop re-dying. The British enlightenment, Janes argues, invented the now widespread wish-fulfilling afterlife and illustrates how afterlives change. She also considers the surprising afterlife of afterlives among modern artists and writers who no longer believe in worlds beyond this one. Drawing on a variety of religious traditions; contemporary literature and film; primatology; cognitive science; and evolutionary psychology, Janes shows that in asking what happens after we die, we define the worlds we inhabit and the values by which we live.
650		0	_aFuture life.
999			_c236315 _d236315